Clara Schumann, Pianist and Composer

One spring day in 1824, four-year-old Clara Wieck sat in the nursery with her three younger brothers, Alwin, Gustav, and baby Victor. Alwin and Gustav babbled in baby-talk, Victor wailed, but Clara was perfectly silent. Clara was always quiet-mute. She had not yet spoken a word. Nearly five years old and not a single word out of her! The child must be simple. Maybe she was deaf. How tragic for Music Master Wieck to have such a daughter!

But Clara was not deaf. The piano music of her father’s students rang out. Clara heard the glorious strains of music wafting through the house all day long.

From the moment four-year-old Clara Wieck Schumann heard music coming from her father’s piano store, she wanted to play the piano. She became a child prodigy and made her debut at nine and went on to have the longest concert career of any woman in the nineteenth century. At the age of eighteen, she was named Royal and Imperial Virtuosa-the highest musical honor in Austria.

Clara wanted to do more than entertain. She wanted the audience to feel love, sorrow, joy, and beauty. She achieved this with a new style of playing the piano. She managed to have a sixty-year concert career, marry Robert Schumann and oversee his estate, plus raise their eight children. As a celebrated composer, she wrote a piano concerto, chamber music, songs, pieces for piano, and her most well-known work, the Piano Trio in G Minor.